We are Bereaved Families for Peace and Justice. This blog serves as an outlet for our views, and a repository for documents, reports, images and comments pertaining to the experience of being Israeli victims of terror. You can email us at bereaved.families@gmail.com

Wednesday, August 21, 2013

Who we are

Thanks for visiting our site.Bereaved Families for Peace and Justice is a group made up of Israelis who have experienced first-hand the loss of a loved one to the barbarism of terrorists. We regard ourselves as non-political.

The group, which brings together people of all ages, all religious persuasions, all parts of the Israeli political spectrum, came into being after the Government of Israel announced its consent to an American proposal to free 104 terrorists from their Israeli prison cells in August 2013. These men are sometimes called pre-Oslo prisoners, though if the intention is that their crimes or their convictions pre-date the Oslo Accords of 1993, the name is inaccurate.

A first group of 26, all of them convicted murderers, were set free on August 13, 2013. They were received in Palestinian Arab society as heroes, as we knew they would. Images of the joyous reception they received are all over the web, here for instance.

While the identities of the killers is well-enough known and reported in the global media, far less attention was paid before, during and since the release of the first 26. Those victims, almost universally faceless, unremembered, unimportant to the process of freeing their murderers, are at the heart of our concern.

We who have suffered the deaths of children, parents, spouses, partners, siblings, know the bitterness of that experience. We know, also, the injustice of viewing the crimes committed by their murderers as somehow lesser crimes, not up to the level of horror of a 'normal' non-terrorist crime. The sense that this is not the moral, just or decent way to view the terrorists and their actions is what motivates us.

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